An interview with Marissa Mayer

Good morning.

I'll keep the intro short today since my story on Marissa Mayer about her new AI assistant Dazzle AI, from our interview earlier this week, is plenty long on its own.

First, friend of The Aisle Mike Mallazzo is offering my subscribers 50% off tickets to the annual BRXND NYC event on November 5. It's a no-BS industry gathering for people working at the intersection of marketing and AI. Mallazzo and his colleagues at the AI marketing consultancy Alephic, which hosts the event, are some of the smartest folks I know in the space. Get your discounted ticket here today to join them next week.

Elsewhere, another Walmart development caught my eye this week. The retailer is partnering with the startup General Medicine to offer a shoppable catalog of more than 900 healthcare products and services, including estimated prices. Earlier this year, I wrote about General Medicine's General AI, which aims to connect AI health advice with actual medical care. Coming just days after Walmart unveiled its Agent Gateway, I wonder whether healthcare could eventually become another category that outside AI shopping agents help consumers navigate.

Finally, Amazon unveiled five new Alexa devices this week. What stood out to me was how little emphasis the company placed on voice-enabled shopping, a capability that was once central to Alexa's pitch, versus household management features. Much of Amazon's more ambitious AI shopping work these days appears to be focused on Alexa for Shopping in its app and website, along with its expanding effort to help customers shop at other retailers.

Now on to the good stuff…

When former Yahoo CEO and early Google employee Marissa Mayer first announced her new AI assistant Dazzle AI a few weeks ago, I knew I wanted to interview her about it.

At the time, we were smack in the middle of the Muse-Instinct craze, but Mayer and Dazzle were taking a different approach. Their bet was that the screenshots on a user's phone, and other photos in their camera roll, could provide better context for an AI assistant than other connectors like email or calendars.

I went back and forth with Mayer's team for a bit setting up a chat for last week, but unfortunately had to postpone it at the last minute. We rescheduled for this past Monday, but I then watched in horror as one anecdote in a weekend New York Times profile of Dazzle went viral on X and other social networks, leading to a bevy of negative coverage, including even on TMZ.com.

The anecdote involved Mayer asking Dazzle to help describe one of her 10-year-old twin daughters for a school birthday celebration. As of Wednesday, a tweet calling the use case “so bleak” had racked up more than 3 million views. I immediately understood why the internet was going to have a field day with that one as a quick reading could have suggested that Mayer needed help from AI to choose three unique traits of her daughter. The prevailing judgment online: How sad was that?

Still, I suspected there was more context. I've written enough profiles to know how much context ocan get lost when a single anecdote takes on a life of its own. And while Silicon Valley's wealth bubble has surprised me plenty over the years, I had a hard time believing Mayer had simply asked an AI assistant to tell her what made her daughter special.

I'd also spent some time testing Dazzle myself, and was curious about how useful an assistant built around our camera rolls could really be, and how comfortable people would be giving it that kind of access.

So I was glad Mayer didn't cancel our interview on Monday. We talked about the birthday slide, of course, and then got into the questions about Dazzle that had made me want to interview her in the first place.